Zoe Kazan: “If you’re basing your whole sense of self-worth about when you get a callback, you’re going to be pretty unhappy”

When you do it all, it’s hard to find balance. Just ask Zoe Kazan, who wrote and starred in the recent indie Ruby Sparks.

“It’s sort of the central struggle. I’m not great at doing that balance,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “In a really practical way, it’s hard to keep grounded in the rest of your life, when you’re asked to travel for work physically, mentally. And then it’s like, ‘Oh, my taxes!’ Or, ‘I have to see friends!’ Or, ‘Oh, don’t I have an absentee ballot to send in?”

Ruby Sparks, out this week on DVD, was Kazan’s first foray into both writing and acting in a film. “Acting dictates the schedule of my life,” the 29-year-old said. “I have to give acting more weight when I think about my life because it’s the thing that organizes it. It’s how I make my living. I have wanted to be an actor for a long period of time. I wrote because, if I didn’t, I thought I would go crazy.”

“When you’re acting, you can end up with a lot of downtime to write. If you’re basing your whole sense of self-worth about when you get a callback, you’re going to be pretty unhappy. So I started to write to save myself, so that wasn’t the sole sense of my self-worth.”